A Sticky Situation

My three year old is determined to give me a heart attack.  Two days ago I noticed Jack's mouth was full of something.  He opened his mouth to show me what it was and it was a HUGE wad of gum.  It looked like he had twenty pieces of gum in his mouth.  I'm sure you can imagine.  Sticky slobber oozing out of the corners of his mouth, and his mouth slowly opening and closing as he's trying to chew a whole package of gum.  He tries to confirm what I already know by telling me what it is.  As he says "gum," more drool falls out.  I freak out because I know he has no intention of just chewing it; he swallows every piece of gum that he gets.  I'm just picturing this huge golfball of stickiness stuck in his stomach for seven years.  I know, I know, that's not true, but still.....  And that's if he doesn't choke on it first.  I'm thinking to myself, it's a good thing Halle and I just did a CPR refresher course this week.

He spits it into my hand, juicy gum slobber and all.  Where did he get gum?

I then remembered that Halle got a whole POUND of Sour Patch gum from her friend.  I had told her when she first got it that she needed to put it out of her brother's reach.  So I start yelling at Halle.  "Your brother could have choked!  I told you to keep it away from him!"  She's telling me that she did by placing it up high on her bookshelf.  She walks into her room.  This is what she finds:  one stool on top of another stool.  I'm guessing he tried to reach with the first stool, and couldn't, so he put another one on top of that!!!!  As you can see, the mother load of gum is sitting on the first shelf, and on the stools lies an open and empty package.  Then I start freaking out (again) thinking of all the ways he could have broken his bones climbing up there... or how the whole bookshelf could have fallen on him.

So today I was doing some laundry and pulled a load of clothes out of the dryer.  There was this super icky residue completely and utterly STUCK to every square inch of my dryer's drum.  What in the world is it?  Turns out Jack had some more pieces in his shorts pockets that I did not know about.  Those wonderful treasures coated the whole dryer and probably the whole load of clothes (I haven't checked them yet because I'm too scared to look.)

doesn't that look like a whole lot of fun to clean?

Thankfully Halle wanted to see what she could find that would clean it.  She spent a solid twenty minutes wiping out the dryer.

So, if you ever need to get gum out of your dryer, you'll need a dry rag, a bunch of windex, and a whole lot of elbow grease.